TAMPA, Fla. — A Plant City company is turning commercial waste into energy cubes that are being burned for energy at a Bay area cement plant.

What You Need To Know

  • NuCycle Energy in Plant City turns commercial waste like cardboard, wood and Styrofoam into energy cubes 

  • CEO Mark Barasch loves being part of a green energy company

  • Companies pay a "tipping fee" to NuCycle for taking their commercial waste

  • Cemex plant in Brooksville burns tons of the energy cubes as part of the cement making process

NuCycle Energy is located on County Line Road and operates out of a big warehouse style building. It gets its commercial waste from Walmart and other businesses like furniture retailers. Those companies pay NuCycle what is called a tipping fee to take the waste. It’s the same kind of charge they would pay a county landfill.

CEO Mark Barasch is enthusiastic about the process.

“When I look over at this pile that someone again might refer to trash, I see every part of it as a component of the fuel we engineer and manufacture here,” he said.

That trash is largely cardboard, Styrofoam and roles of plastic tinting. Sometimes, the individual parts might have been appropriate for recycling, but they are stuck together so they can not be recycled.

Barasch said that is great for the energy cubes manufactured by NuCycle.

“We want that cardboard because of the fiber it’s composed of and the Styrofoam because of its British thermal unit or BTU value.” That means the energy cubes burn very hot.

NuCycle workers send the trash into a conveyor belt that sends it to two levels of grinding. Then it passes by a giant magnet to extract any metal. “We have 100 percent ferrous metal separation in this plant,” he said. “We are very proud of that.”


Then, everything is sent to a compacting machine that turns out tons of small cubes a day. Right now, all of it is taken to a Cemex plant in Brooksville.

“They will use all 129 tons that we manufacture today and deliver today. They will use all that today and tomorrow we will do the same thing again,” said Barasch.

Cemex said the NuCycle energy cubes burn cleaner than the coal it normally uses for the cement making process. It would like to use even more of the energy cubes.

Barasch loves being a part of turning one man’s trash into another’s treasure. “In terms of living in a society and needing to go to work because I have a family, I couldn’t imagine doing something I’d rather be doing. I feel very fortunate to be involved in this.”

Barasch said NuCycle hopes to build more of its plants near other Cemex pants around the country and near electric utilities that could use the energy cubes instead of coal.